Hello Everyone,

We recently redesigned the layout of our site and added some new templates that totally look different that the ones we had. I understand that most of you never visited the site before and may not have an idea of the difference, here is a link (www.templatearchives.com) to the old site and here is the new www.templatearchives.com so you may be able to compare. Please provide us your input on the following factors:

1. Speed - Fast? Average? Slow?
What do you think of our loading speed compared to other template sites you know.
2. The layout itself.
3. The navigating system. Is it easy to surf around or difficult.

Anything you dislike or like? Please let us know, all feedback, comments, and/or suggestions are highly appreciated.

Regards,
Rosanda

OMG. I was just typing this up, and it was complete, and stupid freaking Mozilla closed the tab!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

I am sure I will leave a few details out of what I HAD wrote up, anyways... Here goes.
1. Speed - Fast? Average? Slow?
- Average, but could be a lot better. You could implement a GZip compression found: http://desilva.biz/php/zlib.html to better compress your site. Spend about 1 week trying to compress your images, and you wll have a screaming faster site!

What do you think of our loading speed compared to other template sites you know.
- It seems to be about the same. Might be a little bit slower. Most template sites have a list of a TON of images on each page, your template site only have a few ones.

2. The layout itself.
Sigh.. This was the logenst post I made and it was closed before I could send!!! [Pulls hair out and uses hammer on computer]

Your current header is what catches my eye. It stands out the most and looks very professional. After you pass down the header (going from top to bottom) it doesn't seem to look at "awesome" as I thought the header did.

You might even want to go ahead and make the header an actual intro in flash. Then you JavaScript to check if the browser has flash installed, if it does not have flash installed, then display an image.

It is always best to display the best looking templates on your site rather than to have the new ones. This just makes users automatically assume that the site will have all templates of this great quality. While if you added one not-so-good template, it would not look good for your image on the frontpage.

The Back and Forward buttons should be removed. If I was going to use that function at all, I would just use my browser's back and forward buttons- not yours.

The main content table:
Should have the same colored border as the background color of:

The normal hyperlinks are somewhat dull. They go from a hard-to-read color to the normal color of your text. There should always be a great distinction between the two colors.

Lastly, maybe add a rollover effect for your buttons on the header- just to make your site stick out some more.

3. The navigating system. Is it easy to surf around or difficult.
- Little bit of both. You really need a page named contact us so people will know where to go to contact you. Yes "mail" is what it is right now, but contact us would sound much better, and it wouldn't make someone guess if the word "mail" was the place to contact you.

The Upload feature is nice, but there is no documentation for it when you click upload. There is just a simple box that you use to upload your content.

The last review I just wrote for you was twice as long as this. So I think I missed a few points. But this should give you more than enough time to work on it and come back with another review in a few days or so.

To end this review, I would urge you to switch to PHP pages. This will end up working better for you in the long run. I used to use all .htm pages, then I decided to do ONE thing, and I had to rename ALL of my pages from htm to php. Over 80 pages, and around 15-20 links per page.

hi,
first of all, thanks for the broad tips you gave. I have done almost everything, but theres one tip that i think didn't work or didn't help, ie: the Gzip compression. I did it as it was stated on Desilva's site that i should do, but noticed no difference.
Don't know, maybe its because i'm using broadband.
Could you please tell if you could notice a difference?

thanks in advance.

Savings: 71%. In essence, the page will load faster. Of course noticable on dial users mainly. If your cable connection downloads at the normal average speed of 256kb/s you WILL NOT be able to see a file even download when you goto your web site. (Since it is such a small file). It takes longer for most people to view the page, than it does to download.

its almost 3 weeks now since i last posted a request here.
I have been working very hard on improving the site's loading speed and i hope i succeeded.
I have cut down the size of the page to more than a half of it original size and worked on the images sizes..

I also have scanned the site at Netmechanics and it was given a 5 star, but that is not enough, cause i would really need your opinion, to know if the result was worth the work...

Please let me know what you think.

Well, first time I loaded it, it took around 15 seconds. I couild see each image loading. Maybe it was a slow server at that time- I am not sure.

- You never did this.

- On the left side in the box, it should have position = top.

and
- Should line up correctly. I see that NEW TEMPLATE is a little lower positioned than the other.

Also, NEW TEMPLATE should be NEW TEMPLATES < with the 's'

On http://www.templatearchives.com/submitted.php looking on the right side.

- Should be a link containing more information about advertising on your site.

Also you do not have any copyright information at the bottom. Although in the US you do not need it to be considered copyrighted material (in the US it is always copyrighted) you still might want to show it.

done my best and looking again for some of you good critics.

More changes made, please let me know what you think....

hi guys,
can anyone give me an advice on how i could get more traffic to my site...?

You could try starting a new thread in the Web Promotion forums and ask this last question of yours there.

If I were you, I'd concentrate on the Search Engine bots first...